    [Non-patent Document 1] UPnP™ Forum, “UPnP™ Device Architecture 1.0”, UPnP™ version 1.0.1, December 2003.    [Non-patent Document 2] 3rd Generation Partnership Project, “All-IP Network (AIPN) feasibility study (Release 7)”, 3GPP TR 22.978 version 7.1.0, June 2005.    [Non-patent Document 3] Stefan Mahlhecht, Peter Palensky, “Linking control networks and wireless personal area networks”, Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation, 2003. Proceedings. ETFA '03. Sep. 16-19, 2003, Piscataway, N.J., USA, IEEE, vol. 1, 16 Sep. 2003, pages 31-36    [US patent application 20040266439] Lynch, Jamel P. JR., Miller, Brent A. and Wesley, Ajamu A. “Systems, methods and computer program products for connecting ad hoc piconets to wide area networks”, US Patent Application 2004/0266439A1, December, 2004.
This invention relates to the field of telecommunications in personal communications networks. More particularly, it concerns on how selective updating of service advertisements can be performed over the communications networks.
When a new device is added to a user's Personal Area Network (PAN), the device may choose to advertise its service(s) into the user's PAN. A typical technique for service advertisement is Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) as defined in [Non-patent Document 1]. UPnP is a distributed, open networking architecture that leverages TCP/IP and the Web technologies to enable seamless proximity networking in addition to control and data transfer among networked devices in the home, office, and public spaces. It is designed to bring easy-to-use, flexible, standards-based connectivity to ad-hoc or unmanaged networks whether in the home, in a small business, public spaces, or the Internet.
Using the UPnP discovery protocol, it allows that device to advertise its services within the user's PAN. It does this by multicasting discovery messages to a standard address and port. For the device to advertise the full extent of its capabilities, it will have to multicast a number of discovery messages corresponding to each of its embedded devices and services. Each message contains information specific to the embedded device (or service) as well as information about its enclosing device. Messages should include duration until the advertisements expire; if the device remains available, the advertisements should be re-sent with a new duration. If the device becomes unavailable, the device should explicitly cancel its advertisements, but if the device is unable to do this, the advertisements will expire on their own.
However, service advertisement in the current UPnP architecture is only suitable for a local area network environment, for example management of devices within a single home network or single office network environment. As the needs and requirements of digital living advances, a user's home network space may span across multiple homes or offices. A case in point is a user may have a house in town, a holiday home, and even some of his personal devices in his offices. The user would like to consolidate all his personal devices and define them as his personal network space. Therefore, a user is still able to retrieve the services provide by the different devices which are located geographically far apart as if they are within the locality of his home or office network. A typical example of user's Personal Network is defined in [Non-patent Document 2]. A Personal Network consists of more than one device under the control of one user providing access to the All IP Network (AIPN). These devices are interconnected by the AIPN such that the user perceives a continuous secure connection regardless of their relative locations.
In [Non-patent Document 3], the paper gives an overview on how a node is able to discover services within a particular domain or across domains. This method involves a node being able to be aware of localized services in terms of location, device capabilities or other profiles. However, this method does not specify how the node handles changes in its service profile, which is the focus of our invention.
[US patent application 20040266439] proposes a method of sending the service advertisement from an ad-hoc piconet to another ad-hoc piconet over the Wide Area Network (WAN). For this prior art, they propose the use of an application server within each ad hoc piconet. A service manifest that is located within each application server aggregates the ad hoc piconet services advertisements that are available from multiple clients within the ad hoc piconet and advertise the aggregated service list over the wide area network to other application servers. However, by broadcasting the service list over the WAN is a waste of the network resources if a particular ad hoc piconet has no need of the services advertised.
It is thus an object of the current invention to provide a method to allow a user's personal gateway to perform selective updating of service advertisements among all PAN(s) within the user's Personal Network.